Remote video feeds are routinely used by news organizations and sporting events to share live, high quality video feeds with their primary audiences. Due to the lack of high capacity wired networks at most of these locations, these video feeds are commonly performed over satellite uplinks and less commonly over terrestrial 3G wireless networks. Satellite uplinks require the content organization to deploy a dedicated vehicle with a large antenna, power supply, and high power transmitter. This broadcast truck and associated communications hardware and systems are both cumbersome and expensive. As a result, most broadcast organizations have limited resources and have to deploy them sparingly and at great expense. Terrestrial cellular uplink systems, while technically feasible, often require complex and expensive uplink bonding systems and despite efforts to achieve sufficient bandwidth, often fail to deliver the quality and bandwidth required to transmit broadcast-quality video. Further, if many companies congregate in a news-making location and simultaneously attempt to transmit their broadcast, the end result is a depletion of wireless resources, reducing the ability of any organization to transmit broadcast quality information and the devastation of the resource for all other public users on the network. These terrestrial video uplink systems lack an effective method and technology for reservation of uplink resources, wireless access, user devices, and distribution servers.
Overview
A wireless access system comprises a base station and a control system. The base station wirelessly broadcasts a pilot signal including a network access provider identifier that identifies a wireless video service. The base station wirelessly receives a wireless video uplink request from a wireless video device in response to the pilot signal. The control system processes reservation data for the base station to determine if the wireless video device has a current wireless video uplink reservation and directs the base station to provide a wireless video uplink to the wireless video device if the wireless video device has the current wireless video uplink reservation. The base station wirelessly receives video data from the wireless video device over the wireless video uplink as directed by the control system.